Wedding Bell Blunders: A Freshly Baked Cozy Mystery
Page 12
I gasped. She had done it. I just knew she had. I had Alec on the phone before she made it out the door.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Well? What do you think?” I asked Alec when we stepped into the room.
“Wow.” He stood there with a suitcase in each hand, looking around the room. “It looks like Laura Ashley threw up in here.”
I lightly slapped him on the arm and closed the door behind us. “It’s beautiful. Don’t you like all the flowers?”
He shook his head and walked over to the bed, laying both suitcases on top of it. “I can’t believe you booked us into a flower garden. Didn’t they have any real rooms?”
I gasped. “Stop it. It's a lovely room.” The truth was, it did look a little bit like Laura Ashley threw up in here. The wallpaper had a pink background with yellow flowers sprayed across it, and the bedspread and curtains matched it. I hadn’t seen anything like it since the early eighties.
It was our first stop at a bed and breakfast on our honeymoon. The bed and breakfast was in a quaint seaside town, and I wished that the weather was a little warmer so we could have gone swimming. But as luck would have it, the sun hadn’t come out from behind the clouds since we began our trip earlier in the morning.
Jodi Miller was behind bars, as she should be. She had killed Richard Thomas. When Alec tracked her down, she had at first maintained her innocence, but she became nervous under pressure, and she broke, admitting she had killed him. But then she immediately retracted that confession. She had done it, of course. Alec wasn’t exactly sure why, because after her arrest, he had turned the case over to the police, and we spent the rest of the evening packing for our trip.
I went to the window, pulled the curtains back, and looked out. We had a view of the ocean, and it was beautiful. “The view is lovely.”
“I’m sure it is,” he said, unzipping his suitcase. “How long did you say we were staying here?”
“Three days.”
He groaned. “The wallpaper makes me dizzy.”
“Quit complaining.” I went to him, pulled him to me, and kissed him. “We’re on our honeymoon. Finally.”
He grinned. “Finally. I’ll try not to complain too much.” He kissed me back.
“I appreciate the effort.” I smiled up at him. How had I gotten so lucky to get to marry him?
“Anything for you,” he said, turning and removing some of his shirts from the suitcase and hanging them in the closet. His phone rang, and he answered it.
I went to my suitcase and began unpacking, hanging my clothes on the opposite side of the closet.
“Really?” he asked. He was quiet for a few moments. “You’re kidding.”
There was more silence as I finished unpacking my suitcase. Since he was busy on the phone, I finished his unpacking and then sat on the edge of the bed while he talked to whoever it was that had called him.
He started laughing. “I’ve heard of crazier things.”
It had to be someone from the police station, and I was impatient to hear what was going on. If he had been a little more thoughtful, he would have put them on speaker so I could hear the conversation.
He laughed again and then hung up. Turning to me, he said, “Jodi again confessed to killing Richard.”
“What did she say?”
He sat on the bed beside me. “She had money problems, and when she caught onto the fact that Richard was selling drugs out behind the catering business, she told him she wanted a cut of the money, or she was going to tell Della and get him fired.”
“Wasn’t she afraid he would kill her for doing that? He was selling drugs, not girl scout cookies.”
He nodded. “You would think. But her money troubles were extensive. Her car was repossessed, as you know, and she has more than fifty thousand dollars in credit card debt. She was also about to get evicted from her house.”
I whistled. “I like shopping, but fifty thousand dollars worth of credit card debt is a lot of shopping. But Della found out about the drugs anyway. Did Jodi tell her?”
He shook his head. “No. Della caught onto it herself. When she fired him, he really did think about the choices he was making and tried to clean himself up.”
I sighed. “That’s a shame. So the medication was Jodi’s? How did she get him to take it?”
“The medication was hers. She had hoped it would look like he was an undiagnosed diabetic. Although she should have realized it would have shown up in his system. She kept badgering him to go back to selling drugs. She had some ideas about how to market them if you can believe that.”
“I think drugs market themselves, unfortunately. But that’s pretty low that he was trying to get clean, and she wanted him to go back to selling drugs so she could get some of the money.”
“It’s very low. To answer your question, she crushed the pills and mixed them into some no-bake energy bites that she made. She wasn’t sure if baking them into something would affect the medication, so she chose a no-bake recipe.”
“No-bake energy bites?” I asked. “Not the protein drinks?”
He chuckled. “Not the protein drinks. She was trying to lose weight, so she had been making the energy bites and realized it wouldn’t be hard to mix the crushed pills into them.”
I snapped my fingers and pointed at him. “I saw him pop something into his mouth when they were getting the food ready for the reception. But wouldn’t he have tasted the medication?”
He shrugged. “The recipe has honey, dark chocolate, and peanut butter in it. She also added ginseng and holy basil to help cover up the taste of the medication. He was trying to get healthy, so I guess even if they didn’t taste great, he ate them anyway.”
I sighed. “I need that recipe. It sounds good. Without the medication and the herbs, of course.”
He chuckled. “I think I’m going to pass on those.”
I shrugged. “Suit yourself. But they sound tasty. And they’ll probably help you keep your energy up when you run.”
“I’ll stick to using runner’s gel, thanks.”
“Was he out drinking the night before he died?”
“Jodi admitted that she didn’t know that, but she told everyone he was in an attempt to get them to believe he had gone back to drinking. And if he had gone back to drinking, people would think he also went back to using drugs and had caused his own death.”
“So she was angry about not getting a cut of the drug money, and she killed him?” I asked.
He turned to me. “Affirmative.”
I shook my head. “Well, she won’t get those protein shakes or the energy bites in prison.”
He chuckled. “How do you know? Maybe she’ll be sent to a fancy prison with a gym and a juice bar.”
I snorted. “I guess she can hope.”
He chuckled again. “No, she’s not going to enjoy prison. It won’t be a country club; I can tell you that. Her credit cards aren’t going to be any good there.”
We had our suitcases unpacked, so we headed out to the car to take a drive around the town. There were lots of antique shops and other things to see and do. But mostly, this was just a quiet little seaside town, much like Sandy Harbor. I just hoped that we wouldn’t run across a murderer.
The End
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